The recent collapse of the Borders Books & Music chain became much more understandable to me when I visited the half dozen or so locations in my area during their last week in business. In each store, I discovered around a dozen compact discs by The Dutchess and the Duke remaining on the picked-over music shelves.

It was puzzling, to say the least. In what reality were the music buyers for Borders living, that they would stock their shelves so deeply with The Dutchess and The Duke? Not ours, unfortunately. If their handling of this particular band was indicative of their general mindset, the people in charge of acquiring music for Borders let their own apparently impeccable taste in music cloud their judgment of America’s taste as a whole and paid the price for that overly charitable assessment.

Speaking for myself, I’d love to live in a reality where Borders’ faith in the American musical preference was justified and where overloading the CD racks with The Dutchess and The Duke’s brand of bluesy psych-folk was a sound commercial decision. But alas, we don’t, and discovering dozens of discs by the band in the emptying shelves of a dying retail chain was a wtf? moment of the highest order. On top of that, not only did Borders go the way of the dinosaur, but The Dutchess and The Duke had actually preceded them into oblivion, packing it in a year before the company that apparently had tremendous faith in their commercial potential did.

If we lived in the reality the Borders music buyers believed we inhabited, it would be headline news that the Duke – Jesse Lortz – is back with a new solo project called Case Studies. The people of America would be hanging on every word Lortz sings on “The Eagle, or the Serpent.” We would all be thrilling to the contrast between Lortz’s vocals, which recall Dylan’s weird Nashville Skyline voice, and the sweet female voices arrayed behind him like a madrigal chorus. Across the nation, Americans would marvel at the skillful arrangement, the way additional instruments are subtly introduced behind the strummed acoustic guitar until there’s a full band playing by the end of the song. “The Eagle, or the Serpent” would be in the mainstream, not a song by a cult project by the survivor of another cult project.

Sadly, the reality in which Jesse Lortz is a major star is not the one we live in, as Borders discovered too late. But mistaking major talent for major commercial potential is at least a noble blunder and the music buyers for Borders should be applauded for that. In a better world, those Dutchess and The Duke CDs should have flown off the shelves and not still been sitting there forlornly as the stores prepared to shutter for good. The advance buzz for Lortz’s work as Case Studies would have been deafening.

It’s not that world, though. But at least we still have Lortz recording songs like “The Eagle, or the Serpent” to dull the edge of that harsh reality.

You can find “The Eagle, or the Serpent” and ten other tracks on Case Studies’ debut LP, The World Is Just A Shape to Fill the Night, out now on Sacred Bones.

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Unicycle Loves You “Mirror, Mirror”

Fifteen years ago, Fountains of Wayne released their eponymous debut LP, a near-perfect set of twelve power-pop songs supercharged with clever lyrics about life on both sides of the bridges and tunnels which connect New York and New Jersey. The second single from that record, “Sink to the Bottom,” managed to turn the line “I just wanna…” into a powerful B chorus.

Even this many years later, it’s impossible to hear Jersey quartet Big Troubles turn that same phrase into the hook of “Misery” without thinking of their musical forebears. It isn’t just the repetition of the lyric–it has as much to do with the fact that Big Troubles tap into the mid-1990s musical zeitgeist, that post-grunge, slacker rock era when there was no shortage of excellent bands getting signed to major labels, a Superdrag for every Superchunk.

“Misery,” the second song on the band’s debut, Romantic Comedy, has an earnestness and a strain of melancholy absent from the FoW catalog, but the core promise to the listener is essentially the same: memorable melodies flanked by smart guitar parts. Although Big Troubles play it subdued, there is clearly an affinity here for the classic power-pop sensibility admired by fellow tri-staters Free Energy. Where those two sounds come together–at the intersection of 120 Minutes and Big Star–is where you’ll find Big Troubles.

Click here to listen to Romantic Comedy on Spotify.

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After many repeated listens, it all boils down to this: the problem with Devon Williams‘ “Your Sympathy” is that when ends after three and a half minutes, you’re just going to want to listen to it again. However, further spins only amplify the issue, making you more inclined to want to hear it once more. It’s a powerful feedback loop–this song is a mesmerizing enchantress.

“Your Sympathy” was first released as the A-side of a single back in late June but finds its proper home as the second track on Williams’ new sophomore LP, Euphoria. Although his sound is an excellent fit for the Slumberland label (home to previously featured acts including Veronica Falls, Girls Names, Spectrals, Gold-Bears, and others), Williams doesn’t especially sound like any of his peers in particular. Instead, his music favors the jangle of formative 1980s indie-pop acts like Felt, Let’s Active, and even Aztec Camera, with their broad, warm melodies.

When Williams anchors the line “Ooh, I can’t get your sympathy” as the track’s focal point, he does so expertly, allowing a world of ever-increasing musical layers to swirl around that chorus’ gravitational pull. What begins as an accompaniment characterized by a single, stellar electric guitar riff soon gives way to the song’s final twinkling cosmos, dappled with lilting strings and new ideas from multi-tracked guitars, their notes bursting into life like so many little stars.

This is part of the reason “Your Sympathy” stands so tall during each subsequent listen: there is always a new shimmer to be seen dancing across its surface. Of course, all of that texture would be for naught if it weren’t for Williams’ sublime sense of melody, which is (as it should be) its main source of Euphoria.

Click here to listen to Euphoria on Spotify.

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Tim Williams “I Hit Another Wall”

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With its lilting accordion melody, “Underwater Savior” by San Diego’s Adams and Eves sounds like a tune playing at a Parisian café on a sunny spring day as Audrey Hepburn stares wistfully across the boulevard – at least until vocalist Adam Powell joins the proceedings, sounding for all the world like a well-intentioned spaniel who’s acquired the power of speech. His endearingly artless voice lifts the song out of its Gallic-pop trappings and drops it firmly in the American indie field – no actual Parisian would ever allow himself to record such a clearly un-suave performance.

Fortunately, the combination of smooth music with awkward vocals and impressionistic lyrics is a charming one. Adams and Eves consists of two very musically adept families – three Powells and two Lees (and one Mudd) – performing exquisitely crafted bedroom pop somewhere in the vicinity of The Boy Least Likely To, Belle and Sebastian, and The Ladybug Transistor, with lush instrumentation that feels simultaneously ornate yet intimate.

Powell’s lyrics speak of attempting to hold on to fleeting moments while life sweeps you forward in its path. “You and I, darling / are silver-spined starfish / who cling to the mountains / of monstrous creatures / that delve through the depths and beneath,” he sings, after an attempt to rescue the setting sun from the depths of the sea fails. It’s an appropriate topic for a band like Adams and Eves to dive into – their mix of refinement and guilelessness is as ephemeral as trying to grasp sunlight beneath the sea.

“Underwater Savior” comes to us from this year’s self-released Dear Professor LP.

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